From a wealthy family of Jewish origins, Sassoon was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Clare College, Cambridge. He left college without receiving his degree and spent a number of years leading a country gentleman's existence, fox-hunting, playing sports and writing poetry. He enlisted in the Sussex Yeomanry as a cavalry trooper at the outbreak of the First World War. In 1915, he transferred to the Royal Welsh Fusiliers where he received his commission and was posted to France. In 1916, he won the Military Cross for bravery under fire and soon received the nickname "Mad Jack" because of his recklessness in combat. While in France he met and befriended Robert Graves. Becoming disillusioned with the war, he wrote a protest which was published in the Times and which would have led to his court-martial if not for the intervention of his friend Robert Graves. He was assessed to have shell-shock and was sent to Scotland for convalescence, where he met Wilfred Owen, there for the same reason. They became great friends and when Owen was subsequently killed in battle, Sassoon took it upon himself to get Owen's poems published. In early 1918, Sassoon published The Old Huntsman which praised the noble aspect of war, but later in the same year he produced Counter-Attack which portrayed war as pointless and brutal. After the war, he published a series of three semi-fictional autobiographies which depicted his life before the war in Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man (1928), during the war in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and following the Great War in Sherston's Progress (1936). He followed these with three more volumes of non-fictional accounts in The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942) and Siegfried's Journey (1945). His other works include Collected Poems (1947) and The Path To Peace (1960). |
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